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Israel Is Building a Secret Tunnel-Destroying Weapon
Israel Is Building a Secret Tunnel-Destroying Weapon
As Hamas expands its tunnel network in Gaza, Israel, and the United States
are collaborating on a clandestine project to thwart the Islamist group’s
subterranean advantage.
By Yardena Schwartz Foreign Policy March 10, 2016
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/10/israel-is-building-a-secret-tunnel-destroying-weapon-hamas-us-gaza/
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza — Bassem al-Najar has been homeless since August 2014,
when Israeli warplanes demolished his house during the 50-day conflict that
killed more than 2,000 Gazans and 72 Israelis. Najar lost his brother in the
war, and for the next four months, he lived in a U.N. school with his wife
and four children, along with 80 other families. They moved into a
prefabricated hut, resembling a tool shed, in December 2014, where they
expected to live for just a few months until their home was rebuilt. Today,
he is still one of an estimated 100,000 Gazans who remain homeless.
Yet while much of Gaza still lies in ruins, what has taken less time to
rebuild is Hamas’s subterranean tunnel network, the very thing Israel
entered Gaza to destroy.
During Operation Protective Edge, the name used by the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) for the 2014 war, the military uncovered and destroyed 32 cross-border
tunnels that snaked for miles beneath Gaza and reached into Israeli
territory. Many of them, according to the IDF, began inside homes and
mosques in Gaza and ended inside or on the edge of Israeli border towns.
Hamas has made no secret of its efforts to fortify its labyrinth of tunnels,
which have emerged as the group’s most powerful weapon — far more effective
than its rocket arsenal. In just a handful of tunnel attacks over the course
of that summer, Palestinian militants managed to kill 11 Israeli soldiers
and capture the bodies of several soldiers in the hope of arranging a future
prisoner exchange, in which Israel would trade Palestinian prisoners for the
return of soldiers’ bodies.
During the 2014 war, Hamas fired more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars
at Israel, according to Amnesty International. Thanks to the Iron Dome, a
first-of-its-kind anti-rocket system developed by Israeli engineers with the
help of nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government, many of them were shot
out of the sky before they could reach civilian towns and cities. The Iron
Dome explains the extremely low number of civilian deaths on the Israeli
side. But there is no Iron Dome-type system that has proved as effective at
thwarting Hamas’s tunnel network.
Although they are still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt and are living
with just a few hours of electricity a day and barely any potable tap water,
Najar and other Palestinians are not angry with Hamas for rebuilding the
tunnels, which could lead Israel to wage another war to destroy them.
“What angers me is that the occupation is still imposing a siege on Gaza,
which prevents the building process,” he says.
In fact, since the cease-fire between Israel and the militant Islamist group
Hamas, more than 3 million tons of construction material have entered Gaza
through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, according to Israeli figures.
The first major tunnel attack occurred near that same crossing in 2006, when
19-year-old Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas militants.
Hamas held Shalit in Gaza until 2011, when Israel exchanged him for 1,027
Palestinian prisoners. The prospect of capturing another Israeli soldier,
and concluding another prisoner exchange, is one reason the tunnels are so
valuable to Hamas.
According to experts in Palestinian politics, there is actually a surplus of
cement and other construction materials in Gaza, leading to a black market
that has enabled Hamas to easily repair the tunnels that Israel destroyed in
2014 and build new ones.
“It’s no secret that Hamas has its ways of getting these construction
materials,” says Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at
Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “There are some Palestinians who buy cement to
rehabilitate their homes at the fixed price of 560 NIS (new Israeli shekels)
per ton [roughly $143] but sell it on the black market for 800 NIS [roughly
$205]. This is part of the problem. Some of the Palestinians aren’t using
the cement to rebuild their homes.”
While Israel struggles to prevent the construction material it is allowing
into Gaza from ending up in Hamas tunnels, it is developing a secret
military weapon designed to eradicate the problem.
According to intelligence officials, Israeli engineers are working
tirelessly to develop what’s being called the “Underground Iron Dome” — a
system that could detect and destroy cross-border tunnels. According to a
report on Israeli Channel 2, the Israeli government has spent more than $250
million since 2004 in its efforts to thwart tunnel construction under the
Gaza border.
The United States has already appropriated $40 million for the project in
the 2016 financial year, in order “to establish anti-tunnel capabilities to
detect, map, and neutralize underground tunnels that threaten the U.S. or
Israel,” said U.S. Defense Department spokesman Christopher Sherwood. While
the majority of the work in 2016 will be done in Israel, Sherwood added,
“the U.S. will receive prototypes, access to test sites, and the rights to
any intellectual property.”
Contrary to reports quoting the Israeli Defense Ministry, which claimed that
the United States had already earmarked $120 million for the project,
Sherwood said that appropriations are done annually, thus there is no
guarantee that an additional $40 million will be appropriated in 2017 and
2018.
Among the Israeli companies working to develop the new anti-tunnel mechanism
are Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the same company that
developed the Iron Dome rocket defense system. Both companies declined to
provide any details due to security reasons, as did the IDF and other
Israeli officials, who fear that such information could play into Hamas’s
hands. Yet according to intelligence sources who spoke with Foreign Policy
on the condition of anonymity, the system involves seismic sensors that can
monitor underground vibrations.
IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Gadi Eizenkot hinted at these efforts in February.
“We are doing a lot, but many of [the things we do] are hidden from the
public,” he told a conference at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center. “We
have dozens, if not a hundred, engineering vehicles on the Gaza border.”
Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and former head of Israel’s National Security Council,
told FP the confidential new system is not yet operational, but it is “in a
testing mode.”
Since the beginning of 2016, nearly a dozen Hamas tunnels have collapsed on
the Palestinians who were building them, killing at least 10 of the group’s
members. While winter rains have been blamed as the culprit, the wave of
collapses has led many here to wonder if Israel’s new secret weapon is
already at work.
Asked by the Palestinian Maan News Agency in February whether or not Israel
was behind recent tunnel collapses, the coordinator of government activities
in the Palestinian territories, IDF Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, responded,
“God knows.”
Hamas, too, is paying close attention to Israeli attempts to thwart its
tunnel network. Haniyeh, the senior Hamas official, told Gazans at Friday
prayers on Feb. 19 that the Islamist group had “discovered an underground
vehicle on which were installed cameras and sensors to monitor tunnels and
fighters.”
Even if Haniyeh’s claim is true, Israel still appears unable to completely
counter Hamas’s subterranean advantage. And if the development of the
Underground Iron Dome is any indication, it could be several years before
Israel is able to employ an effective anti-tunnel system.
In the meantime, Israeli residents of Gaza border towns are growing
frustrated with what they perceive as a government that lacks any vision
beyond fighting a war with Hamas every two or three years. Israel has fought
three wars with Hamas since it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 — 2008’s
Operation Cast Lead, 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense, and 2014’s
Operation Protective Edge. While border residents wish the government and
military would do more to protect them from Hamas’s tunnels, many of them
also want the government to help the people of Gaza.
“Gaza is a pot that’s about to boil over, and unless something changes
there, nothing is going to change here,” says Adele Raemer, who lives a mile
from the Gaza border in Nirim, an Israeli settlement.
“People can’t live like that without exploding. They are going to go
underground and build tunnels if that’s how they are going to make a
living.”
According to veteran Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff, the former Arab
affairs correspondent for Haaretz, digging tunnels is one of the best ways
to make a living in Gaza. Tunnelers typically earn about $400 a month, says
Issacharoff. It’s a decent salary by Gaza standards, where unemployment is
among the world’s highest, at 38 percent, according to the Palestinian
Central Bureau of Statistics.
“It’s a two-pronged problem,” says Raemer, a New York native and mother of
four. “On the one hand, we have to protect ourselves, but on the other hand,
we have to make it livable on the other side. I believe the people in Gaza
want the same things we want here: security, safety, the ability to put food
on the table for our children. It’s just complicated when you have Hamas
ruling there. They’ve held us and the people of Gaza hostage.”
Raemer ends our conversation with a lament: “We’re worse off now than we
were before Operation Protective Edge, because Gaza is getting worse.
Operation Protective Edge was supposed to protect me.”
It’s a feeling echoed by many Israelis living along the Gaza border, who
would like to see a long-term solution to the problem that is Gaza, not just
the symptom that is the tunnels.
Source: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=70186
